“They’re not that different from some of the protests that we saw coming from the Tea Party.” — Barack Obama on Occupy.
According to the San Jose Mercury News, “Occupy Oakland protesters broke into City Hall, stole an American flag from the City Council chamber and set it on fire Saturday night, punctuating a wild day in which police deployed tear gas, arrested more than 400 marchers and dodged hurling objects. Demonstrators spent the day trying to break into a convention center and temporarily occupying City Hall and a YMCA.”
According to Occupy, it it’s the fault of the police. “In a news release Sunday, the Occupy Oakland Media Committee criticized the police conduct, saying that most of the arrests were made illegally because police failed to allow protesters to disperse.”
The New York Times reports “the clashes began just before 3 p.m. when protesters marched toward the vacant Henry J. Kaiser Convention Center and began to tear down construction barricades.”
Several hours later, some of the protesters broke into City Hall, the police said. On Sunday, Jean Quan, the mayor of Oakland toured City Hall to survey the damage to the building. Glass display cases had been smashed and graffitti was splashed on the walls, The Associated Press reported . At one point during the protest, The A.P. quoted Mayor Quan as saying that demonstrators who broke into the hall burned flags, broke an electrical box and damaged art displays, including an exhibit of recycled art that had been made by children.
Nothing will come of it. Just as when ‘students’ smashed and burned the Conservative Party headquarters in Britain, or trashed Trafalgar Square; or just as when objects are thrown at John Howard or glitters pitched at Rick Santorum or Newt Gingrich the conclusion will be the same. It was nothing but the natural reaction of those who are angry at the heartless politics of greed. As the man who threw glitter on Santorum said, “feel the Rainbow. Stop the Hate.”
The narrative is it’s always the other guy’s fault. The message is: ‘What else could I do but put the glitter in my hand, throw the pie at Rupert Murdoch, pitch the shoe at John Howard, burn the flag at Oakland, trash the kid’s exhibits, shit on the police car. It’s not my fault.’
It’s a rehash of ‘Bush made me do it’. But maybe the real term to describe what Occupy and their clone brands are out to achieve is much simpler: intimidation. They are scaring people and politicians into realizing that this too could happen to you if you know what I mean. Nice campaign you’ve got there, Mr. Candidate, it would be a shame if something happened to it. Nice private life you have there, Mr. Pillar of the Community. But we know what you did last summer.
Warren Buffet caught the tone exactly when he described a Presidential meeting with some businessmen. “I think the president felt, ‘My God, look at all the things we did for business, and they’re unappreciative, and I’m all that stands between them and the pitchforks’.” But to make that work you need pitchforks. So you produce them.
But it’s not really the kids, jobless people and aborigines on welfare. They are just the buck privates in the reserve street army of the Left; the real masterminds are elsewhere. In many respects these just are the modern day Brownshirts.
The Brownshirts were political auxiliaries of the the Nazi Party. They were recruited from the ranks of the no-hopers to do things like defend the beer halls where the Nazis met and break up meetings in other beer halls where other militant political parties, like the Communists, met. Of course they weren’t called Brownshirts at first. They had nicer names.
There was little organization or structure to this group, however. The group was also called the Ordnertruppen around this time. More than a year later, on 3 August 1921, Hitler redefined the group as the “Gymnastic and Sports Division” of the party (Turn-und Sportabteilung), perhaps to avoid trouble with the government. It was by now well recognized as an appropriate, even necessary, function or organ of the party. The future SA developed by organizing and formalizing the groups of ex-soldiers and beer hall brawlers who were to protect gatherings of the Nazi Party from disruptions from Social Democrats and Communists.
What many have now forgotten was that the Brownshirts were also a global phenomenon. There were the Blackshirts in Britain, the Blueshirts in Canada and in Ireland and even the Silver Shirts in America. Like the man said, “Feel the Rainbow.”
There are two obvious ways to deal with such groups. The first is to organize a paramilitary structure of one’s own and the other is to rely upon the regular police forces of government to maintain peace and order. The preferred option is to rely on the police, otherwise civil order is compromised. But where the administration in power tacitly employ these paramilitaries to carry out their dirty work, in certain corrupt cities for instance, then the police protection option often fails. Sometimes things just get out of hand, surprising even their sympathizers.
The dangers inherent in this were highlighted when it emerged that aides of Australian Prime Minister Gillard were largely responsible to for raising an aboriginal mob to protest allegedly racist comments which they themselves had concocted and siccing them on Opposition Tony Abbott. Unfortunately, the mob wound up threatening everyone at the venue, leading to evacuation of Prime Minister Gillard.
Malicious untruths were told, gullible people ready to believe the worst of a conservative leader were incited to violence.
And, let there be no mistake, the protest was violent, despite post-facto declarations to the contrary.
The 100 people trapped at an awards ceremony with Gillard and Abbott inside the Lobby, a 1968 building wrapped on three sides by floor-to-ceiling glass, felt rattled as protesters outside screamed obscenities and banged on windows.
But it would have worked out OK if only Tony Abbott was discomfited.
Eventually these street mobs, as in Oakland, become an inconvenience to their puppeteers. The rent-a-mobs begin to assume airs and believe that they themselves, not their hidden masters, are the real powers behind events. What eventually happens to them was demonstrated by the fate of Brownshirts during the Night of the Long Knives. Accustomed, no doubt into believing “police brutality” consisted of the their own overblown engagements with regular street cops, they met the real thing one night at the hands of executioners dispatched by the Nazi Party. Then they learned what real police brutality was.
The same fate met the Red Guards. “By February 1967 political opinion at the center had decided on the removal of the Red Guards from the Cultural Revolution scene in the interest of stability”.
The PLA violently put down the national Red Guard movement in the year that followed, with the suppression often brutal. A radical alliance of Red Guard groups in Hunan province called the Sheng Wu Lien was involved in clashes with local PLA units, for example, and in the first half of 1968 was forcibly suppressed. At the same time the PLA carried out mass executions of Red Guards in Guangxi province that were unprecedented in the Cultural Revolution.
The Occupy members are probably approaching the stage where they’ve become more of a liability rather than an asset to “them”. A photo gallery at the Washington Post provides a visual update of all their ‘peaceful protests’. Have they finally worn out their mandate from “them”? Or are they just warming up for 2012? For those who don’t believe in “them” here are the words of Aboriginal Leader Michael Anderson.
Embassy co-founder Michael Anderson now complains: “Someone set us up. They set the Prime Minister up. They set Abbott up.” Indeed. But Gillard insists: “Mr Hodges [her press aide] in taking these actions acted alone.”
Sure he acted alone. And if and when the media discovers a mastermind behind it all the conclusion will be unsurprising. Bush did it. Feel the Rainbow. Stop the Hate.
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